From Bad Beginnings

How Paula Fox dealt with her childhood.

Fox in 1947. She’d had a hard time: no money, no love.Credit COURTESY PAULA FOX

In 1923, Elsie de Sola Fox, a nineteen year-old Cuban-American girl who had had four abortions, waited too long to get a fifth, and the novelist Paula Fox was born. Elsie and her husband, the writer Paul Hervey Fox, immediately dropped the child off at a foundling hospital in Manhattan, but Elsie’s mother was unhappy about this, and she went and retrieved her granddaughter. From then on, Paula was passed around among relatives and friends and paid help. She didn’t see her mother again until she was five. She later wrote, “I sensed that if she could have hidden the act, she would have killed me.” After a couple of more years, Paul, who, with Elsie, was then living in Hollywood (they were trying their hand at screenplays), asked that Paula be sent to him. For the first time, she and her parents lived together, an arrangement that lasted two weeks, at which point they packed her off to someone else. As Paul later explained to her, Elsie had given him an ultimatum: “Either she goes or I go.” In a way, the father was worse than the mother. Paula came to hate Elsie, but she loved Paul, and he—a far-gone alcoholic, bent on placating Elsie and just about everybody else—let her down, year after year. (One time, when she was in her teens, he left her in his apartment for several weeks with twenty-five dollars and a case of beer.) But when he was with her he was charming and almost affectionate. From him, she, too, learned to placate, so as not to lose what love she could get.

James Joyce once said that all novelists have only one story, which they tell again and again. That is more true of Paula Fox than of any other fiction writer I know of. Her six novels and her memoir “Borrowed Finery” all deal with the story of her terrible childhood, or at least with its psychological consequences. Fox has now produced another volume, “News from the World: Stories and Essays” (Norton; $24.95), which brings together short pieces stretching back to the first two stories she ever published. Most of the pieces here, too, allude to her childhood, but, unlike her novels, “News from the World” is a slack job, the sort of thing that writers put together when their editors or their agents or their spouses tell them that they can squeeze out one more book. Fox is eighty-eight. Furthermore, she was mugged one night in Jerusalem, in 1996, and sustained a head injury, with intracranial bleeding, that badly affected her ability to write. (She could still do it, as is clear in “Borrowed Finery,” from 2001, but she has said that she had to drag that book out of herself word by word.) So she has a right to relax now. But if you don’t already know Fox don’t buy the new book first. Get the novels of the nineteen-seventies and eighties. The most admired (and it is very fine) is “Desperate Characters,” from 1970, but I believe that the best, a masterpiece, is “The Widow’s Children,” from 1976.

However often Fox repeats her story, she tells it differently from book to book. Sometimes, she is elegiac. In “The God of Nightmares” (1990), the final novel, the heroine looks out her bedroom window and remembers her father, who drove off one morning when she was ten and never came back:

When I looked down at the oblong of the stable, the course, the foremost rank of pine rising like a cliff face, I imagined I was moving around in my father’s mind just as, when a child, I moved through the stable, the barn, around the weathered planks of the course fencing, at the base of whose posts still grew clumps of Queen Anne’s lace. I had gathered bouquets of it, filling up as many jam jars as my mother would spare me while he and a stableboy tended the horses.

Here Fox sings an aria, but at other times the descriptions of cruelty are short and ugly—throwaway lines, almost. In her excellent first novel, “Poor George” (1967), the hero, George, goes to visit his sister. She greets him:

“You! What a surprise! Come in. I suppose you’ve only got five minutes? Claude, push off!” She tried to shake free from her seven-year-old son, who clutched her around her waist. As quickly as she disentangled his fingers from her belt, he grabbed handfuls of her skirt. Claude’s head was covered with a paper bag. He made no sound as he struggled to hold onto her.

We’ve never seen Claude before, and we won’t see much more of him. Nor does Fox ever tell us why he had a bag over his head, though this is somehow perfect.

Elsewhere, we get confrontations that are like something out of the Oresteia. “The Widow’s Children” features what is probably Fox’s most horrifying character, Laura Clapper, the only literary figure who has ever made me afraid when she walked onto the page. Laura screams insults—and then laughs piercingly—at everyone, above all her husband, Desmond, a prostrate drunk (“his underwear was damp from slovenly urinations”). But when she goes on the attack he merely pats her hand and chides her softly, “Please stop, puppy.” Once when she launches into a tirade, he escapes into the bathroom. To get him back, she drops her cocktail glass on a radiator, and the sound of the shattering glass brings him out. “Darling,” he says. “Dropped your glass? I’ll clean it up.”

As all this suggests, Fox thinks that the psychological consequence of hostility within a family is passivity. This is a subtle concept. In her world, unloved children don’t grow up to take heroin or kill somebody. They just develop a “hardened heart,” a handicap that is as much perceptual as moral. Having denied the heart’s feelings for so long, they no longer know what it feels. And Fox’s novels often capture their main characters at the moment when, with chilling fear, they find out.

According to Fox, the habit of passivity, by shutting the mouth, opens the eyes. The person’s powers of observation become sharp. If, then, he is able to overcome the passivity, he achieves a heightened honesty with himself. Join this to the earlier-won accuracy of perception and you have some very mixed, because unedited, emotions. In “The Western Coast” (1972), the heroine, Annie, drifts, accommodates. “Going to bed with men is your idea of good manners,” a friend says to her. Annie comes to pity her ill-used body. It seems to her “like the lost animals she sometimes saw slinking into the doorways of closed shops late at night.”

Such knotted emotions raise the book’s intellectual level, and give it traction, as does Fox’s habit of shifting the point of view. The switch may be brief, or it may break the novel in two, to brilliant effect. Most readers of “The Widow’s Children” will expect the book to be the story of Laura’s daughter, Clara (the Paula stand-in), liberating herself from Laura (the Elsie stand-in), and that’s the way things look for the first two-thirds of the book. Then, in an unsettling maneuver, Fox gives the last four chapters to a hitherto minor character, Peter, an editor, who for years has been Laura’s friend, or whipping boy. During a long, torturous night, he finally defies her, and thus forfeits her friendship. Of all the many passivity renunciations in Fox’s work, this one—on the part of a dry, cynical man (Fox describes him as seeming to have been pressed between two blotters)—is the most moving.

Much of its poignancy derives from the fact that Fox, as in her other novels, marks the triumph not with any great epiphany but just with a small, salutary image. In the last paragraph of the novel, Peter remembers a

spring morning when he was twelve years old, when he’d awakened in his bed by the window and seen, freshly fallen, the last thin snow of the year, heard, below in the kitchen, the voices of his mother and his sisters as they went about making breakfast, known the cat and dog had been let out because he saw their paw marks braiding the snow, and felt that that day, he only wanted to be good.

This does not mean that Peter’s life will now change, or even that it was better when he was a child. (His mother and sisters have previously been described as a nasty lot.) But the images are all notes of hope: the spring, the breakfast, the little paw prints of the cat and the dog, and, finally, the wish, so long ago, to be good. Did he succeed in being good? We don’t know. The scene is not a sunrise—merely a point of light.

Fox has faults, primarily in structure. The books are episodic; her characters go from encounter to encounter, in the course of finding out how they feel. This is a serious problem. Not only the new book but also the late novels, “A Servant’s Tale” (1984) and “The God of Nightmares,” sag. Even “Borrowed Finery,” whose early chapters, the ones dealing with the six years Fox spent at the home of the only guardian she ever really loved—Elwood Corning, a Congregationalist minister whom she called her uncle—are as fine as anything she ever wrote, dithers in its second half: this happened, then that happened.

Within a scene, though, Fox can be thrillingly dramatic. When she was eight, she and her grandmother spent a year and a half on a Cuban sugar plantation owned by a branch of the family, where they were taken in as poor relations. Fox uses that plantation again and again, as a kind of lost paradise, or an illusory one. Here are the opening words of “A Servant’s Tale”:

“Ruina! Ruina!” my grandfather, Isidro Sanchez, had scrawled at the end of his farewell note to my grandmother, which, she recounted, in a voice still astonished after all the passing years, he had written only an arm’s length from where she sat mending a tear in the shirt he was to wear the next morning when he had been summoned to see Antonio de la Cueva, the proprietor of the sugar plantation of Malagita, to answer, among other serious questions, why he had not fulfilled his cane quota and therefore could not guarantee his rent for the coming year.

“He looked up from time to time,” Nana told me. “He stared at my hands in a way he had when he was thinking. I finished my sewing. He began to fold the note. He did so precisely as he made paper boats for our children, and he wrote a word on it.”

Then he took his hat from the peg on the wall and went out. The word on the outside of the note, as the grandmother discovered in the morning, was her name. He had gone to a nearby swamp, where he killed himself.

Fox owns all the basic property of realism. She knows what a cheap apartment looks like, and what it means, in the world, to have a decent overcoat. Furthermore, politics—the situation of blacks, immigrants, homosexuals, women kicked around by men—is never far from her work. But she goes way beyond realism. In “The God of Nightmares,” which is set in New Orleans, the heroine, Helen, meets Mr. Metcalf, a fruit importer. “I stared fixedly at Mr. Metcalf’s mustache,” she says, “in which I was sure I detected the tiny amber claw of some crustacean whose other parts he must have consumed for lunch.” Such images pass beyond clarification—imagery’s usual duty—and, as with the French Symbolists, move into a territory of their own, where they become an expansion, a riff, an extra adventure. In the title story of “News from the World,” which is set in a seaside village, a frail old man and his much younger housekeeper fall in love. This is never consummated; all she does is care for him and sit with him. Now and then he places his hands on parts of her body. Finally, he returns to the city he came from. In winter, she goes to the beach to look at his empty house: “Inside the sleeves of my coat, where I’ve drawn them against the cold, my hands form cups to hold the balls of his feet, the joints of his kneecaps, the small cheeks of his behind.”

In her young adulthood, as in her childhood, Fox had a hard time: no money, no love. At twenty, she became pregnant, the result of a one-night stand. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she gave the baby up for adoption. The child grew up to be a self-help writer, Linda Carroll. As an adult, Carroll hired a detective and tracked her mother down. In “Borrowed Finery,” Fox says that she has had a close relationship with her. Through her, Fox also acquired a granddaughter, Carroll’s child Courtney Love, the grunge diva. They had lunch together once. It wasn’t a success.

At twenty-five, Fox married a public-relations man, who was a good earner. That union, which produced two sons, lasted six years. Later, she married Martin Greenberg, a critic and a translator, who at one point was an editor at Commentary, together with his famous brother, Clement. (Fox met Martin when he rejected a story of hers.) In the mid-sixties, the family moved for six months to the Greek island of Thasos. There Fox started her first novel, “Poor George.” During the next twenty-three years, she produced five more novels, a slow rate. She also wrote twenty-two children’s books—actually, they are “young adult” books, most of them dealing again with childhood sorrows—and these, less daunting to write than regular fiction, may have interfered with her work on novels.

I have read repeatedly that, in contrast with the young-adult books, which were quite successful (“The Slave Dancer,” from 1973, won the Newbery Medal), Fox’s novels were neglected. But The New York Review of Books, that exclusive institution, reviewed four of her first five novels, very warmly. Bernard Bergonzi called “Poor George” (1967) “the best first novel I’ve read in quite a long time.” Such appreciation may have been due, in part, to her husband’s connections, but push does not push forever, and Fox’s critical success lasted. A 1980 reprint of “Desperate Characters” (1970) came adorned with blurbs by Alfred Kazin (“brilliant performance, quite devastating”) and Lionel Trilling (“a reserved and beautifully realized novel”). Irving Howe wrote an afterword for that edition, saying that the book “takes its place in a major American tradition, the line of the short novel exemplified by ‘Billy Budd,’ ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ‘Miss Lonelyhearts,’ and ‘Seize the Day.’ ”

Nevertheless, by 1992 all six of her novels were out of print. Now follows a nice story. In 1991, the novelist Jonathan Franzen was at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in upstate New York, thinking about American fiction, specifically the competing claims of postmodernism (which he had been practicing up to that time) and traditional storytelling fiction (to which he soon converted, in “The Corrections”). One day, in Yaddo’s library, he picked up Fox’s “Desperate Characters” and read it, for the first time. It seemed to him “akin to an instance of religious grace,” above all in its alignment of the state of the soul with the state of society—that is, in its realism. Franzen mentioned this discovery in an essay, “Perchance to Dream,” that was published in Harper’s in 1996 and was widely read, not for its comments on Fox but for its support of traditional realism. Still, the mention of Fox struck some people, including the writer Tom Bissell, who was then a college student. Bissell eventually found a copy of “Desperate Characters” and was impressed. By that time, he was working as an editorial assistant at Norton, and when the company’s “paperback committee” asked its younger employees to bring in ideas about what the company might republish, he suggested “Desperate Characters.” The committee authorized him to offer Fox fifteen hundred dollars for reprint rights. She said yes. The Norton edition has now sold thirty-six thousand copies.

Between 1999 and 2002, Norton republished all her novels. It seems to me unquestionable that, as Martin Greenberg’s literary friendships may have helped Fox before, feminism helped her now. If so, good for feminism. All these new editions carried introductions by conspicuous literati—Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, Frederick Busch, Andrea Barrett, Melanie Rehak, Rosellen Brown—praising Fox extravagantly. Franzen, in his introduction to “Desperate Characters,” described it as “soaring above every other work of American realist fiction since the Second World War”—“obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow.” Lethem, introducing “Poor George,” offered a psychoanalytic interpretation of Fox’s being out of print. She had been “denied,” he said, because she wrote so searingly about people’s habit of denial. He urged us to correct our error: “What I mean to say is, for yourself, not for me or Paula or George, read the book. Listen to it.” All this sounds a little hysterical, and righteous. (Many people, when reading fiction, listen to it.) Nevertheless, these writers and the editors at Norton got Fox back into the bookstores, and on the college syllabi. Not a moment too soon. In 2001, she wrote her last important book, “Borrowed Finery.”

In all her treatments of her early life, Fox never tells us how she became a writer. In the course of her nomadic adolescence, she went to high school for only five months. After her sons were born, she attended classes at Columbia when she could. Her adored Uncle Elwood had taught her to read, and he gave her books (as did her father). He also showed her that language should be taken seriously. One day, as he was writing his sermon, he asked her what she thought it should be about. She plucked something out of the air—“a waterfall,” she said—and was surprised, the next Sunday, to hear him give a sermon involving a waterfall. From this, she says, she learned “that a word spoken as meant contained a mysterious energy that could awaken thought and feeling in both speaker and listener.”

But how is it that Fox went on, from book to book, describing her harrowing childhood and yet almost always managed to write about it without self-pity? How did she expel the cruelty of her early experience, so that it could become a literary matter rather than just an emotional one?

Although Fox never explains this, I think she may have portrayed it symbolically. In several books, she talks about snakes. In a story called “Cigarette,” in “News from the World,” she describes an autumn in which her father, typically, dropped her off, age eleven, at a friend’s house:

On hot afternoons I would go for a swim in the St. John’s River. My jumping-off place was one side of a decayed gray dock that rested on splintery posts. I would jump up and down on the rotting planks until four or five water moccasins, poisonous snakes, slithered down the posts and dropped in thick tangles into the river. . . . I found it a relief, a scary relief, to watch the snakes slide down the posts and into floating patches of water hyacinths, their mottled, gray, warty heads poking out from amid the delicate white blossoms and thick green leaves—so substantial, so plainly what they were.

This is a disinterested thought for a child about to jump into a river full of snakes. Also, what made her believe that the snakes wouldn’t bite her once she got into the water? Fox cannot be asking us to believe this. She is writing not a realistic account here but a poem.

In “The Western Coast,” Annie has a huge tapeworm that she finally expels. She has to be careful to get the whole thing out, the doctor has told her. She has to produce the head. What does the head of a tapeworm look like? Does it have eyes, a mouth? You see her gazing into the toilet, trying to figure this out. That is a far more disgusting image than you will normally encounter in Western fiction. Darryl Pinckney has written of Fox that she is “sometimes hard to the point of cold.” I think she needed to be, and that these repellent creatures—the warty snakes, the tapeworm coiling to the very rim of the toilet bowl—may be images of how, after becoming the little gray ghost that she learned to be as a child, she finally extruded that, with horror, and moved forward, empty at first, into art. ♦

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